“Data gathered from smartphones enables service providers to infer a wide range of personal information about their users, such as their traits, their personality, and their demographics. This personal information can be made available to third parties, such as advertisers, sometimes unbeknownst to the users. Leveraging location information, advertisers can serve ads micro-targeted to users based on the places they visited. Understanding the types of information that can be extracted from location data and implications in terms of user privacy is of critical importance,” an important research report warned five years ago.
Controversially, it was revealed last October that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses a location surveillance tool to track mobile devices. (Let’s hope that Apple’s latest improvement to network privacy protection might help de-escalate tensions, as conversation doesn’t yet seem to have been enough.
‘This is surveillance’
Not so many years ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook discussed this seedy side of the data trade: “Our own information — from the everyday to the deeply personal — is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” he said. “These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold. Taken to the extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm.
